Castle Environment

This project is my introduction to Unreal Engine 5, and was guided by Unreal Sensei from YouTube. I learned to utilize the basics, such as lighting, landscape, materials and  instances, texture creation, foliage, and modular design.  The assets used in creation of this project were freely available from Quixel Bridge, or provided by Unreal Sensei.

I used Lumen, to create dynamic lighting, and to be able to freely change the sunlight/shadows on the castles. Lumen is an incredible jump from baked lighting.

Most of the assets utilized Nanite, to achieve high resolution with minimal performance drop. Nanite is absolutely stellar, as it helps create massive beautiful world with little concern for framerate. Sadly, some foliage doesn't support Nanite yet, and an abundance of trees tends to be performance-heavy.

Using the landscaping tools, I created the outline of the mountainous forest, as well as the bodies of water. The water itself is a flat surface, with a normal map to simulate waves. Using a layered material instance, I have grassy fields, rocky mountains, wet dirt for rivers, and dry clay for roads.

Using large mountain assets, I created a background to give a sense of realism: these ARE castles in the mountains. The landscaped hills ended up getting covered by cliff assets in different sizes and angles, to give them more texture. All rock assets are nanite, and look very detailed.

Due to nanite trees being unsupported in the current version of UE5, I have placed dense tree packs in screenshot locations only. The framerate drop is otherwise catastrophic. LODs help, but not much, when compared to Nanite.

Each castle is custom-built from free asset modules. I gave the castles semi-ruined, overgrown look, to simulate a relic-of-the-past feeling. The castle on the left was partly inspired by the Stronghold from Heroes 3.

Lastly, I worked on small details, like twigs on the roads, flowers and ferns, rocks, surfaces, roots.. All of which were also nanite.

This project gave me a good level of understanding of how much time and work goes into the visual aspect of a level. From background and landscape to individually placed dried-out tree trunks. There are a lot of tools to help me, but even more room to manually customize the scene.